What makes Oxford even more awesome is that several locations around there were used for the Harry Potter movies. For example the biggest dining hall was used for the Great Hall (not pictured to the left, the students were having dinner in the great hall while I was there so I couldn`t take pictures. The one on the left is known to be the most beatiful dining hall they have though, but it`s a lot smaller). They also used the library for the movies and the Divinity school for the infirmary. I was in Harry Potter heaven with one of my fellow HP geeks who lives in my house *grins*.

They had Harry Potter tours too, but since HP geeks are a minority we were quickly outvoted and went on a regular University tour instead. It was fun though! Shown on the right is a picture of me in front of the gorgeous college building in which the christ chapel and the great hall were located. I wish I went to that uni.. except for that I`d never make it since I`m neither supersmart nor superrich. They have 4 months of summer holidays though..which sounds rather attractive (except for that they have to do a LOT of self-studying during those months. This is one of those universities where you wouldn`t last for a month without self-discipline).

Anyway, I`m waiting in class now to get my grade for the website I made earlier. Unfortunately, they discuss your grade with your privately for 10 minutes each and it`s not my turn till 11:10, which is in another hour. I can`t leave the classroom though as other people might be ill which would make my appointment shift to an earlier time.

So I`m just sitting here, browsing the web and writing a blog.. I hope my grade will be good! I`m quite confident about it though, so at least I`m not dying of nerves here *grins*

Anyway..I don`t know what to say anymore..I`ll edit the grade in here when I got it. See you!

Edit: I got an A16, it`s the highest grade possible here. WHOOYEAHH

I got a cold about 1,5 week ago and I`m still coughing my lungs out every few minutes. I went to the pharmacy a while ago (where they asked me a lot of medical question in their utterly-impossible-to-understand-unless-they-speak-very-slow-wolverhampton-accent where they gave me a raspberry cough medicine. It was utterly disgusting, I hate raspberries and it was sickingly sweet.. I thought there couldn`t possibly be any worse cough medicine than that. That was, until I got the one I got this time. I decided to go for honey-lemon this time, figuring that I`d like it since I love honey. Unfortunately, this one turned out to be pure lemon juice with a drip of honey. All the muscles in my face contract violently when I drink this one, it`s very uncomfortable.

So, now I try avoiding the medicine all together and try getting better without it. At least I have Lozenges which are only midly disgusting. I miss our cough medicine in the Netherlands which was so tasty that you`d often slip an extra spoonful sneakily.

Anyway, I`ve been to Liverpool on a trip but I have no photographic evidence of this, since the moment I got there my battery decided to drain. Seriously, I put new ones in before I left and when I got there they were empty. UGH.

I`ll get a new chance at making pretty pictures in Oxford this month though, I`m going there the 20th. ^_^

I also got my first two grades, an A+ on Web Application Development and a 15/15 (so basically, also an A+) on Creative Digital Media. I think this shows that I`m not really struggling with the classes here. It wasn`t until I got here that I realized how high the level of education in the Netherlands is.

All the French and German people are constantly whining about how terribly hard it is here and how they`re nearly dying, while all the Dutch people who take the same classes are laughing their ass off at the ridiculous easiness of most classes. I suspect those French students would really die when coming to the Netherlands.

My site has been majorly spammed lately, I checked and in the few days I was gone I got 121 spam comments. Thank god WordPress got a good spam filter which stopped all of them.

Also, I checked my stats today and saw that I mysteriously get about 160 unique visitors a day (that means I`m only one of them), and about 4-5 thousand unique visits a month. Seriously… who reads this shit? Apparently 5000 people a month. You`re all crazy. CRAZY I TELL YOU!!

Saturday I went to the pub at 11am (hey, it`s England..that`s totally normal here!) and got a real English breakfast with a German classmate of mine. The breakfast was delicious but it was soooo much, you could have easily eaten one breakfast with two people (it had two eggs, two toast, two sausages, two bacon, beans and a mushroom).

Monday Sandra (the German girl from my hall) celebrated her birthday so we had another kitchen party. This one had even more people of who no one had the slightest clue who they where, which is kinda weird and makes me lock my door yet fun at the same time. Some of them went out afterwards but I stayed behind with Alice (French, from my hall), Gabor (Hungarian, lives below me, boyfriend of Alice), Alice 2 (French, lives above me..I think), Adrian (Romanian, lives below) and Jorje (Spanish, lives below). Alice 2 was very drunk and kept hitting Adrian…I was very amused *grins*

I also discovered the school library..it`s huge! Four floors full of books <3 Unfortunately, they only have school related books but I managed to find some interesting ones anyway. All the regular literature is in the Walsall campus, which is 40 minutes away (thank god I have my lessons here and not there). They have DVDs at my library though, which will keep me amused for another while too.

The other Dutch girl in the house, Renee (pictured on the right), also convinced me to come try Jitsu. I regret it. A lot. I have bruises everywhere and my muscles ached for two days. It felt like a good workout though, but it`s way to expensive to continue do it if you aren`t madly in love with the sport. I`d have to pay over 100 pounds for just three months if I wanted to join.

This Saturday I`m going to visit Cardiff with people from school, and the 16th of October I`ve been persuaded to go see a soccer match. Wolves vs. West ham United. Ah well, it`ll be fun to see what the English supporters are like

I`m also getting a huge variety of food here with all the international people. Just this week I`ve had Hungarian Langos, French Crêpes and Quiche and some Czech food I forgot the name off but which was very tasty too. I might end up making them Boerenkool

I`ve added new pictures to the photo album, most of them are in the new album: Wolverhampton, parties…or something like that

xoxox Bernadet

I also had my first classes, Monday I had Web Application Development first. We`ll have to make a website in PHP there, something I enjoy doing and won`t have any trouble with. Next I had Impact of IS on organizations. Business modules are new too me so this one will be tougher, and the lessons a lot more boring…but it`s definitely one of the more informative modules.

Tuesday evening I had my best class, Creative Digital Media. In this class we shall make a flash application using Photoshop (<3<3), Flash and Action Script 3.0. I`m really looking forward to it, even though this will probably also be my hardest class. These three classes are all I have so I had the rest of the week off.

Yesterday I celebrated my birthday though, I turned 20 and am no longer a teen. =The wolves just scored!= In the morning I went shopping with the girls and while they were at the next because there was a sale I decided to go purchase a cake. When I returned with my cake they were like NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooo you shouldn`t purchase your own cake!! which kind of confused me. It later turned out though that they`d already bought me a cake, and the girls from the hall across had baked one themselves, so we ended up with 3 of them (we ate at least 2,5 that night though). In the evening I mysteriously wasn`t allowed to leave my bedroom, and when I was allowed out they had decorated the kitchen, made treats and sang me a happy birthday song. It was so sweet! <3

We girls had invited a few girls from the hall across and guys from the hall below so we`d expected the evening to be rather quiet and cosy, but news of parties travel fast and at about 10pm we had 25 people in our kitchen (go see a picture of our kitchen, then imagine 25 people in it) and about 10 more in the hallway. Basically our entire house was there, plus some from the house next door. I knew about 50% of the people who came to my birthday.

It was an amazingly fun night though, and I know I`ll never forget it! I feared being lonely on my birthday here but it turned out to be the most crowded one ever. YAY!

=UPDATE: The Wolves just lost to Aston Villa, and now there lots of people in Wolves shirts passing my building, all looking morbidly depressed. Poor things. =

I just got back from a day of sightseeing in Birmingham with the girls from my dorm hall. We were planning to go tomorrow but after discovering that the pope was coming tomorrow we figured it wasn`t such a good idea, with the crowds and the terrorist threats. So we went today instead, which was a good decision since the weather was amazing! Unfortunately, it also meant that it was sooo crowded that we couldn`t get any shopping done.

The city was gorgeous though, a lot better looking than Wolverhampton, with some amazing architecture. It was great to see a lot of very modern buildings right next to a couple of very old ones. We also discovered that the Cadbury factory is located in Birmingham and that you can actually take tours there and make your own chocolate, so that`s definitely on me to-do list!

What I`ve also learned is that people under 21 can not buy any sharp objects in England. It`s ridiculous! I went to the IKEA two days ago and bought a lamp there. Unfortunately, the lamp required me to take some screws out so I could attach to pieces to each other and put the screw back in. We, of course, did not bring a screw driver and neither did anyone from the other halls in the house. So I went to the supermarket to get a screwdriver and they told me I couldn`t because I wasn`t 21!! While at the IKEA I also tried to purchase a knife set but again, not allowed. There`s a picture of this in the ‘awesomely random’ album.

Pictured on the left is what at least one kitchen in the house looks like on any evening, this night it was ours. Actually, what you see here in nothing as the amount on persons in our tiny kitchens at least doubled over the next few hours. They sure love to party here in Wolverhampton, which is fine as long as they stop shouting in front of my window at 1AM – as they did last night –. I was pretty pissed, since I had to get up again at eight to catch the metro to Birmingham. CURSE THOSE PARTY PEOPLE!!!

P.S. They have a B&J machine here in the shopping mall. It works like a soda machine, but with ice cream..how genius is that?

I shall leave you with this wonderful video, which is scarily enough an accurate representation of the average girl around here:

Hi guys! Just a quick update from me…I`m very tired so it probably won`t be too long. Ah.. who am I kidding? I always end up ranting in these blogs and making them way too long. The problem is that these days people actually read them, it was so convenient to have a diary which no one looked at online before. *grins*

First off, I`ve added new pictures to the site. You can find them in the Wolverhampton tab under the Wolverhampton City and Stratford-Upon-Avon galleries. I do realise that the pictures load very slow because the camera takes huge pictures, I`ll try to set a size limit when I`ve got some time on my hands (the introduction program has been keeping me very busy). Till then, if any of you has Facebook I`ve added them there too (yes people, Facebook, not hyves, Facebook! Use it!).

Right next to this bit of text you can see an image from the huge supermarket I told you guys about earlier. You can`t see properly just how huge it is like this but at least it`ll give you an impression. It`s huge. I love it. It makes me fat.

I`m going to the Ikea next week and I considered buying scales for a moment to keep a check on my weight, but after paying another visit to this supermarket I decided it wouldn`t be worth the depression. I`ll go diet again when I`m back in the Netherlands. I`ve been eating quite healthy so far though, making veggies and noodles and fish and mashed potatoes, but I know I`ll give into the stuff I crave someday… seriously, there`s so much stuff here which looks so damn delicious! I now understand why half of the English population is overweight. They make it very hard not to be.

Seriously…they sell fast-food nachos at the subway. SRSLY!!11!!!

Yesterday, I went to a pub/club for the first time since the student union had organised a party for all international parties. The pre-party at the Uni, which was basically a pub quiz, was kind of boring but the pub/club part was fun (though as always, the loud music made me very dizzy.. a friend I met there used to have the same and she says it`s because the loud bass effects your heart or something… anyway, it`s the reason why I don`t go clubbing ). I met some new people there though, so it was fun. I also had my academic counselling where I got to know my fellow Computer Science exchange students. (There`s another girl! Yay! And she`s in the same year as me! Yay!). Tuesday I`ll have to meet one of the computing lecturers to decide my classes.

Today, I`ve been to Stratford-Upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare. Pictured above is one of the cute streets and a scary-ass-statue of Lady Macbeth. The tour was kind of boring, I`d rather have walked around on my own since it was open heritage weekend this weekend so we could go in for free but we didn`t enter any buildings since we had to get on with the tour. I`ve had a good time though. The only thing I would have loved to do was one of the ghost tours since one of the most haunted houses of England is in Stratford, but the tours are at night and I didn`t get the opportunity to visit the haunted house. Ah well, next time.

I`m dead tired now, from getting up early 6 days in a row, so tomorrow I`m going to sleep in till ridiculously late and make a nice breakfast from eggs and crumpets (yeahhh I don`t have bread or yoghurt in house anymore so I kind of have to anyway *grins*)

ttyl! <3

Hi everyone! I arrived safe and sound in Wolverhampton and am sitting in my cosy little room now. Getting here caused a bit of trouble since my hand luggage was too big, I vomited in the car and I had to take my boots off since they had metal bits in them…but I survived! Once I arrived in Wolverhampton I was utterly and completely lost since this Campus is about ten times as big as the Zernike campus, but even that I have survived!

I`m now in a dorm with 3 girls from the Czech Republic, and they talk funny language with each other. I thought they were Russian first, but alas..they`re not awesome enough for that. Sooooo I live right next to a ginormous supermarket (literally a 1 min walk) where I wandered around for about an hour yesterday, failing to find the stuff I needed but loving the stuff I did find.

Today I decided to go explore Wolverhampton itself and it truly is a gorgeous city centre! I`ve heard people saying Wolverhampton wasn`t pretty but compared to the Netherlands it`s wonderful (though maybe I can`t see the beauty of the Netherlands because I live there). The main street has absolutely everything you need! Starbucks, Marks & Spencer’s, Topshop, Boots, River Island, Next and of course Primark! (And many many many more). After I reached Primark I decided to go home again though, since my bags were already getting too heavy. What I got? Let`s start with the boring essential stuff… A can opener, an oven wand, 2-in-1 washing liquid and softener in weird capsules which you toss into your laundry, two towels (blue and pink) and a laundry basket (purple). And now the awesome things: A black/shiny/romantic/floral bag, a koala pyjama (TOO CUTE), sheep to keep mah feet warm and free shoes!

Free shoes? YES FREE SHOES!!! They charged me twice for the bag at the Primark and they forgot to check the shoes so I returned (since I had paid 8 pounds too much, even if they had counted the shoes) and they returned me 10 pounds, saying I got the shoes for free since it was their fault. Now do your maths on how much the shoes would have cost if I hadn`t received them for free…that`s how cheap Primark is!

P.S. I`ve added a new photo album to the Wolverhampton tab, it has 2 pages with pictures of Wolverhampton and my dorm!

Tonight, at 5am, I`ll be heading towards the airport to start my journey towards Wolverhampton. The plane will be leaving at 9:40 and I`ll arrive at 10:05. Sounds like a super short flight eh? That`s what I though…until I realized the 10:05 is in English time, not in Dutch time, so the flight is actually 1h25m instead of 25m. Ah well, it`s still pretty short. I think it`s about 30 min from the airport of Birmingham to Wolverhampton, so with a bit of luck I`ll be there around 11.

You know what`s really, really, really hard? To move to another country when you`re only allowed to bring 18kg of luggage. I packed yesterday and after just packing my essentials and clothes I had reached 22kg…uh oh…I hadn`t even packed my shoes, bed linen and many more stuff which I had to bring yet. So, I was stressed, and to get the right weight I removed a _lot_ of stuff from my suitcase (with some help from my mum). I ended up taking 1 pair of jeans, a few dresses and t-shirts and underwear. I`ll have to buy everything else there when it comes to clothes, I don`t even have a pyjama!

I`m very, very, very nervous about traveling there on my own but I`m looking forward to it big time too! If I manage to get my internet set up tomorrow evening I`ll give you an update on how it all went ^_^

I`m still excited and terrified at the same time, but I`m sure the terrified part will disappear once I`m there and have met some people.*squeals* I`M GOING TO ENGLAND!!!11!!

Tomorrow I`ll be having a goodbye party with my friends and sunday with my family. I`ll be celebrating my birthday at the same time, since I`ll be in England on my actual birthday –September 25- and I wouldn`t want to miss you on cake and pressies!

I`ll be making a separate wolverhampton photoalbum and will be keeping pictures I make there, while keeping this blog to update ya`ll on what I`m doing there.

Love ya!

Day one: It was the first time I went on a trip with my boyfriend, so that made it even more special. We went there by plane, from Amsterdam. It started out a bit troublesome since it turned out our suitcases hadn`t been paid for yet, and that the flight had been delayed for an hour or so.

For GJ it was his first time flying and he was afraid the airplane would come falling out the sky and kill us all, but luckily that didn`t happen. I never cease to be amazed by the view from a plane…Too bad you spend more time checking in and waiting for your luggage then you do flying. Once we did get properly arrive we still had to find our way into Rome itself, since the airport is a good 30 km away. We managed to catch a bus and (after facing some rude bus drivers and using our GPS) we found the hotel.

Day two: This day we decided to go visit two of the most important cultural sites of Rome, the Colosseum of and the Forum Romanum. We were pretty lucky since we were just about to stand in line for the Colosseum (which was 1,5 hours long!!) when someone approached us and asked if we were EU citizens and below 25 years of age. Since we were, we could join their English tour of both the Colosseum and the Forum Romanum for which we had to pay about half of the usual price and we could walk right past the long long line.

The Colosseum was as impressive as I thought it would be, it`s even bigger than you imagine it to be when you see pictures or video footage. There wasn`t much left of the Forum Romanum (everything was stolen to build the Vatican) but we had an amazing tourguide who told us loads of amusing facts (did you know the average roman was only 130 cm?)

Day Three: This day we decided we wanted to go swimming, since it was terribly hot (and it would continue being terribly hot the entire week). This was easier thought then done, since GJ had read about a pool near the Colosseum but we couldn`t find anything about it when we were actually at the Colosseum. Not a single sign, not a single leaflet…it was like the pool wasn`t even there. Luckily, we had access to Wifi in the hotel so we googled it, and it turned out that it was on a 3 minute walk from the Colosseum but it was so well hidden by trees that you couldn`t see it from the street…we`d actually passed it the day before.

So, off to the swimming pool we went. It was expensive, 14,50 for a day, but there wasn`t a single tourist and the water was wonderful! We spend the entire day relaxing there.

Day Four: This day we visited the Pantheon and the Trevi fountain. We were utterly incapable of finding the Trevi fountain at first and had given up, making our way to the Pantheon, when we stumbled right upon it. It sure was a gorgeous fountain. I felt a very strong desire to go swim in the fountain but unfortunately, it wasn`t allowed…you weren`t even allowed to stick your big toe in the water. (You were more than welcome to toss all your coins in though).

We spend quite some time at the Pantheon, just staring at the ceiling and looking around us (and GJ was playing games on his phone…he`s still a geeky boy! ). Eventually we returned to eat some delicious food (the pizza and pasta really is as good as they say!)

Day Five: We went shopping this day! Being a big lover of shopping, I had a great time. At first I was a bit disappointed since all we saw was Gucci, Prada, YSL, Burberry and more fancy brands which we couldn`t afford. Luckily, I`d read something about an affordable street -the Via dei Corso- and it turned out to be amazing! Best of all, THERE WAS A HELLO KITTY STORE. Yes, you`ve read that right. It was a store entirely dedicated to Hello Kitty, and it wasn`t even a small store…it was huge! I wanted to buy EVERYTHING, but unfortunately it was all very expensive so I only bought myself a fancy wallet. I needed a new wallet anyway since I managed to ruin my old one by putting diet coke in an aquarius bottle. It`s not a good idea..not a good idea at all. Turns out those bottle caps can`t handle the soda and explode, it was all over the walls and ceiling of the hotel room. So I was like
OMGPLEAZTELLMETHISDIDNTHAPPEN and started cleaning like mad, seriously finishing about five minutes before roomservice knocked on the door. I`d managed to save my butt there, but not the contents of my handbag… it was all soaked in diet coke, even my money *sobs* But hey…it gave me an excuse to buy the HK wallet!

We also visited an amazing church which was decorated with the bones of 4000 monks. It was fascinating in a really creepy way, seeing all those skulls all around you. What creeped me out most though were the mummified skeletons of some of the monks and the skeletons of small children. It`s definitely recommend you to pay a visit there though, it`s at the Via Vitt. Veneto. (You`re NOT NOT NOT allowed to make any pictures though, I picked this one from google, when a kid tried making a picture every single one in the church was kicked out until they`d found who`d made the picture…I wonder what happened to the kid who had made the picture).

Day six: This day turned out to be a whole lot more exciting than I`d expected it to be! We were planning to just make a stroll through a huge park when we ran into a pond which was filled with…well, we couldn`t see from a distance but it looked like some crazy fish! When we approached the pond we noticed that they were turtles, a LOT of turtles, at least 60 of them! They were very used to humans so you could feed them (they ate EVERYTHING, from cake to crisps) and pet them. So obviously, we spend the rest of the day feeding and petting turtles.

Day seven: Back home again *sulks*